Looking for ways to scale while maintaining high-quality customer support? Influx works as an added layer of support to clear the backlog, improve CSAT, and fill coverage gaps.
When your business grows, resources must scale accordingly to ensure that your organizational structure can support expansion. Growth is always risky, but the risk may be minimized by taking the right precautions and being well-prepared. Influx can provide businesses like yours with a range of support solutions, allowing you to tap into expertise and resources to help you scale your operations.
How a business scales its operations can affect its endurance. Done incorrectly without sufficient preparation for the scaling-up process might result in putting the entire company at risk. Alternatively, scaling effectively may guarantee the future of a business.
Excellent customer support isn’t simply an important aspect of a successful business, it’s a necessary part of scaling. Organizations must continuously meet customers’ ever-evolving expectations. Reading through this article will help you prepare to scale your customer support and maximize resources without losing quality.
The benefits of scaling customer support
As your business scales up, it’s vital that customer support scales with it. According to Khoros, for 86%, good customer service turns one-time clients into long-term champions. Teams that concentrate on offering excellent customer support are more likely to succeed over the long run and can benefit from:
- Increased revenue: According to HubSpot, 68% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service experiences.
- Improved customer loyalty and satisfaction: Scaling your customer support lets you foster personalized relationships with your target audience and turns one-time customers into repeat buyers.
- Standing out from the competition: Consumers desire to feel seen, heard, and understood. A customer-centric culture shows your customers that you care about their experience, encouraging them to choose you over alternatives.
- Establish a positive reputation: Good customer support can help to resolve issues and complaints quickly and effectively, which can prevent negative reviews and online complaints. It also increases word-of-mouth marketing and recommendations from those consumers’ trust.
Improve customer satisfaction and first response time with Influx customer support solutions. Simple, month-to-month pricing with all management and training included will get you up and running in less than a week for high-quality support that keeps your customers loyal. Scale your customer support with Influx!
Why should you scale customer support?
Growing businesses should scale customer support in order to meet the increasing demands of their customer base. As your business grows, the number of customer inquiries and complaints will also increase, and it is essential to have the personnel and infrastructure in place to handle this growth.
7 ways to scale without compromising service quality
1. Reinforce customer support SOPs
A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of detailed instructions created by a company to aid employees in doing common tasks. SOPs are designed to improve efficiency, output quality, and performance uniformity while minimizing misunderstandings and noncompliance with industry rules.
As support tickets flood in, this added quantity can be overwhelming. Focusing on the value behind standard processes ensures consistent performance. It will help to make these procedures easily accessible so that employees can refer to them whenever it’s necessary. As SOPs are likely to change over time, procedures should be reviewed and updated for redistribution and realignment of expectations.
2. Empower your team with a help desk
Scaling can run the risk of staff fatigue or burnout. Fortunately, there are solutions to this that can automate repetitive tasks and organize responsibilities to make your team’s life easier. Help desks provide technical support to end users, troubleshoot customer and user issues, and aids with specific tasks and actions. A help desk is the first point of contact for customers and employees.
A key feature of help desk software is that it enables users to set up macros, also known as canned responses. Simply put, a macro is a pre-written message to send out when a matching help desk ticket comes in from a customer. As an automation tool, macros can save time on common responses!
Check out our beginner-friendly guide to help desk software that covers everything you need to know about help desks.
3. Build a larger support team
Hiring presents challenges even for businesses that aren’t growing. Building a top-tier customer support team means finding personnel who align with your company values, match your ideal support personality, and have the required skills to bring success.
Excellent customer support starts with the right team, and the right team requires adequate training. Agents need to know the product/service inside and out to be able to offer the best support possible.
4. Leverage an outsource partner
Establishing a relationship with a business that has similar values to yours and is an expert in customer support might be the difference between success and failure. Allowing businesses to focus on core competencies and stay flexible, outsourcing customer support is a favored option among many. Instead of time spent recruiting, hiring, training, and managing, businesses that choose to outsource customer support can expect to scale faster than competition, while also surpassing expectations.
Customer support with Influx is a trusted solution that gives you 24/7 access to experts who are trained in your brand voice.
5. Empower customers with a knowledge base
A strong knowledge base is more than simply a location for your business to save documents and data; it also gives you a strategic upper hand. Customer self-service is defined as a blend of customer-initiated interaction technologies that are designed to enable customers to help themselves. A knowledge base makes it simple for consumers to find solutions to their problems without having to ask for assistance. According to Harvard Business Review,
81% of all customers attempt to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative - across industries.
The power of an effective knowledge base could prevent many customers from needing to reach out for support, which can save businesses a lot of time and money. Utilize a knowledge base and empower your customers to take advantage of it!
6. Keep operations running seamlessly
It’s not just customer support that needs to scale with your business, but order fulfillment, inventory control, and other operational requirements are important to maintaining quality. Intelligent predictive forecasting, innovative technology, and backorder, out-of-stock, and delayed shipping avoidance are all things that keep operations running seamlessly.
The best way to ensure that operations continue smoothly is to balance financial inputs with a strong customer focus and scale slowly. Growing too quickly could create discrepancies. As a result, decisions are made more effectively and over longer periods of time, enabling the business to grow sustainably.
7. Expand support channels
Single-channel support is no longer sufficient. As more consumers expect omnichannel solutions, more businesses are responding to increase customer engagement. Adopting new channels widens the range of support and allows consumers to reach out on their preferred platforms. The next logical question you’re probably asking is which channels do you need? The 8 most popular customer service channels are:
- Phone
- Live chat
- Self-service
- Social media
- Video chat
- Communities and forums
- Mobile messaging
Understanding your customers, what they need, and where they are is an excellent indicator of the channels you should be offering support on.
Mistakes to avoid when scaling customer support
Understanding the risks of scaling up makes space for preventative measures that can help your business grow efficiently and successfully. Here are common scaling mistakes to consider and plan to combat:
- Scaling too quickly
- Losing focus on employees
- A lack of personalization
- Over-automation
- Failing to review or share data
- Ignoring the customer’s voice
- Scaling the incorrect area of the company
- Spending too much time on hiring
Avoid mistakes with cost-effective customer support solutions! The goal of scaling successfully is to attain sustainability for long-term growth. Take the time to consider what you need to achieve your objectives when your business expands.
Scale with Influx; the simple solution
Influx provides an extra layer of support for your existing team. We help businesses scale by providing expertly executed customer support. We can get you up and running in a week. Scale your business with support on demand!
